A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands by Sahana Ghosh, California: University of California Press, 2023; pp 296, $29.95.
The experience of reading Sahana Ghosh’s beautiful book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands, radically alters how one thinks of “borderlands.” Set in the Indo-Bangladesh borderlands of northern Bengal, the book departs from a focus on the legal and political security regimes associated with Euro-American borders. Instead, Ghosh uses ethnographic methods of interviews and participant observation (in particular walking with her interlocutors), oral history, and commodity chain analysis to tell a story of the everyday lives of borderland residents. Building theory from her ethnography, she argues that bordering produces hierarchical relations of value among borderland residents in imbrication with their experiences of nationhood, kinship, gender, risk, securitisation, and dwelling. While intervening in the scholarship on the ethnography of borderlands, the book invests “borderlands” with an expansive conceptual possibility, to which I draw attention in this review.
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